Songfacts®:

• This half sung, half spoken epic was taken from Anderson's 7-hour multi media project "United States 1-V."
• The vocal was spoken through a vocoder to get the distorted sound. Vocoders are devices that can turn analog sounds into a digital output, completely transforming the input signal. They were popular in the '70s and '80s among musicians looking for a futuristic effect. You can hear it on "Mr. Blue Sky" by Electric Light Orchestra and "Radio Ga Ga" by Queen.
  
  Anderson told Uncut magazine about her use of the vocoder. "It's one of my favorite instruments," she said. "I guess I've just always been a geek, and I do love that it's so mellifluous and I liked especially that it was a coding device in World War II, that's its origin. And O Superman was a kind of code. It used a lot of slogans, of the 'have a nice day' and the US Postal slogan variety."
• The 8 minute single release became a hit in the UK after being championed by BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel. To date it is the only hit record by a performance artist.
• Anderson based this song on an aria from the 1885 opera Le Cid by Jules Massenet. She got the idea after listening to a recording of the aria made by Charles Hilland, an African-American tenor.
• This song addresses issues of technology and communication, in particular planes and arms. Anderson told Mojo magazine June 2008 that she wrote this song in a similar time to now. She explained: "In this case it was the Contra affair and defeat as we were experiencing a series of techno disasters- helicopters trying to rescue hostages and crashing in the desert. Oh, and as well as now, yet another war that is endless-or as the same war. The same conflict with Islam." It should be noted that whilst this was written in 1981, the reporting of the Iran-Contra affair (a weapons for hostages deal) occurred in the mid 1980s. Maybe Anderson used the wrong term for the original Iran hostage crisis in 1979-80.
• In the same interview Anderson told Mojo how the song's success didn't really affect her: "I was kind of in the art world, but I did have a good time with that, because I realized how unreal it was and how utterly absurd. As an anthropologist I found it really fun, but not something I wanted to repeat or be repeatable. Just not my scene. And I've seen it be a trap for other people. As a kid I was from a family with money. I was very grateful for that, mainly because it taught me very early as a child that it didn't help to have money. It didn't make you happier, it didn't make you smarter, it didn't make you freer. It often did the opposite of these things."
• Laurie Anderson was married to the American rock singer-songwriter Lou Reed from April 2008 until his death in October 2013.
• Laurie Anderson told Uncut in 2021 it felt a little unusual when she was writing "O Superman."
  
  "It was part of a fairly long work I was writing called United States, and that was the result of spending so much time away from this country, and working elsewhere," she said. "Then you look back and you can see things from a different point of view. And so it was part of trying to get some distance. I would really love to be able to do that now."